The purpose of the proposed research is to develop useful approaches to the acquistion, utilization, and dissemination of medical knowledge by computer programs. A number of researchers have developed specialized computer programs for medical consulting and for teaching. Each of these programs embodies some domain of medical expertise specifically embedded in a computer program. Because such programs are difficult to modify or extend, others have adopted the view that medical consulting programs should be driven by a data of medical knowledge. Even though data-driven medical application programs allow ease of modification and extension, the tools for acquiring such a data base do not exist. As a central part of this research, an information manager for medical knowledge will be interfaced to an interactive knowledge acquisition processor. This processor will be used by a physician to input detailed medical information. Specific items of medical knowlege will be stored in a modified semantic network and diagnostic or therapeutic processes will be stored as rules in the medical data base. These rules will be represented and manipulated as Variable-valued Logic formulas. It is not my purpose to develop a new system for the storage of patient specific medical record data. Rather, the thrust of this research will be to acquire, store, and manipulate non-patient-specific medical information for the purpose of rule generation under computer control.